• Marc Benioff runs Salesforce Ventures and Time Ventures, where he angel invests.
• Salesforce Ventures manages $6.8 billion, with notable investments in AI and cybersecurity.
• Benioff's hands-on approach and mentorship mirror his early experiences with Steve Jobs.

Salesforce chair and CEO Marc Benioff says angel investing is a "side hustle." His returns say otherwise.

Benioff — who shared his investing strategy with Business Insider in an interview — has backed some of Silicon Valley's biggest winners.

Salesforce Ventures has $6.8 billion under management and has deployed $600 million of its $1 billion Generative AI Fund, including a first-quarter investment in Anthropic, according to a spokesperson.

One of its biggest wins is the cybersecurity startup Wiz, which recently sold to Google for a whopping $32 billion. Salesforce Ventures, which first invested in Wiz's Series B in 2021, will make roughly $600 million on the deal, Benioff said. (Salesforce's profit on the Wiz acquisition has not been previously reported. A spokesperson for Salesforce Ventures declined to comment on the firm's profits from the Wiz acquisition, citing the ongoing nature of the deal.)

"I worked directly with Assaf Rappaport," Benioff said, referring to Wiz's CEO and cofounder. "I enjoy working with entrepreneurs. I relate to them."

It's a hands-on approach that in many ways mirrors the early mentorship Benioff, who runs Salesforce's venture arm and writes angel checks through his family office, Time Ventures, received in Silicon Valley.

Founder mode

Benioff's father, who owned a local department store in San Francisco, instilled in him an entrepreneurial spirit from an early age, which fueled Benioff's early career moves.

In high school, Benioff sold his first startup, software that taught users how to juggle, to a computer magazine for $75. At 15, he founded Liberty Software, which made early computer games. While in college, Benioff spent a summer interning at Apple, writing code for the Macintosh team under cofounder Steve Jobs.

It also gave Benioff an early mentor in Jobs. "There would be no Salesforce.com without Steve Jobs," Benioff said in a 2013 interview with Entrepreneur magazine.

Fast-forward a few decades, and Benioff is at the helm of Salesforce, a $255 billion market cap Fortune 500 software company, still thinking like a founder.

Working with and investing in founders, Benioff said, encourages him to think more deeply about how he's running his own business. "I am one myself," Benioff said of being an entrepreneur. "I still feel like I'm running a company where you have to be able to adjust to the market as it adjusts and do whatever you can to be successful."

Paying it forward

Founders in Benioff's portfolio don't just get capital — they get his Rolodex. "I can offer way more value to these entrepreneurs than any venture capitalist," Benioff said.

Benioff said that founders who stand out to him create a shared vision. "Many of these people are visionaries," he said. "They're seeing things that don't exist. Am I also able to see what they're seeing?"

He also looks for entrepreneurs who have learned what works and what doesn't, and how to adapt based on that experience.

One of those visionaries is Richard Socher, the founder of the AI-powered search engine You.com. "Marc has been an incredible supporter of my journey," Socher told BI in an email. "Not only did he lead our seed round for You.com, which also included the You.com domain he had owned since 1996, Marc has opened his network to me, introducing me to early customers and CEOs at Fortune 100 companies."

Benioff's Time Ventures invested in You.com's $20 million seed round in 2021, and Salesforce Ventures backed the company in its $25 million Series A in 2022 and its $54 million Series B in 2024, according to PitchBook.

When asked about the AI boom, Benioff said he's still able to discern the most compelling companies from the bubbly ones, pointing to his investments in Socher's You.com and the AI terminal startup Warp, which was founded by Benioff's cousin Zach Lloyd. "They have real revenue lines and real customers and real products that are offering real value," Benioff said. "When you see that, then you've got to say, 'That's a real company.'"

Benioff invested in Warp's $17 million Series A1 in April 2022, according to PitchBook.

This reality-based outlook is necessary when investing in startups with under $100 million in revenue, which Benioff called "fragile companies." It also prevents him from romanticizing early-stage investing, which he doesn't think is right for everyone. "I don't encourage my family and friends to get involved in this," he added. "It's very high risk. Most of these companies do not work out."

Amid the AI hype cycle and a boom in venture investing, Benioff still sees founders' grit — even in himself. It's a mentality he, after decades of building Salesforce into a giant, hasn't quite yet shaken. "We still pivot like an entrepreneur has to pivot," Benioff said. "We're still in founder mode at Salesforce. We're just a 75,000-person startup — there's no difference."

• US and Chinese AI advancements took center stage at a major conference on Wednesday in Singapore.
• Salesforce's CEO criticized Big Tech's spending on data centers and AI development.
• Alibaba's cofounder said open-sourced models could spur innovation outside Big Tech companies.

Some of the biggest names in tech and finance talked AI in Singapore on Wednesday, highlighting the hot debate about American and Chinese tech advancements.

At the CNBC conference, Salesforce's CEO, Marc Benioff, said some tech leaders have fallen into a "hypnosis" about the number of data centers and the level of training needed to create AI models. The emergence of seemingly low-cost, high-tech Chinese models like DeepSeek's R1 shows that these investments might not be necessary, he said.

"It has to be rethought. Exactly what are you doing and why are you doing this?" he said of the Big Tech companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on hardware.

Benioff has been vocal about his dislike of how much capital Big Tech is earmarking for data centers and AI advancement.

During the same panel, Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio said that the US is still winning against China in designing leading chips. But he said China has the upper hand in actually using AI.

"China is behind, but not by a lot, in the best chips," Dalio said.

Joe Tsai, Alibaba's cofounder, said the "so-called DeepSeek moment" is more about the open-source movement than which country has the best AI. Open-source models allow for the free and open sharing of software to anyone for any purpose.

Tsai predicted a rush of development on top of existing open-source models — which won't just benefit Big Tech companies.

With open-source models, "the AI game is not just left to the five richest companies in the world that can afford to invest $50 billion a year," he said.

In January, DeepSeek, a Chinese startup, launched an open-sourced AI model that rattled US tech and AI companies. Third-party tests showed the model outperformed its peers from OpenAI, Meta, and other top developers in some tasks, and the company said it was built for less money.

• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff questioned whether Big Tech's AI investments are delivering results.
• Salesforce is focusing on AI integration, not building costly data centers, Benioff said Wednesday.
• The company reported fourth-quarter revenue of $9.99 billion, missing consensus estimates.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has berated Big Tech peers for their spending on AI and data centers, questioning whether companies like Microsoft are seeing real returns on their massive investments.

Benioff said Wednesday that Salesforce isn't investing in projects that would suck up the company's cash but wouldn't guarantee big returns.

"We aren't building huge $10 million, $20 million, $30 million, $100 billion data centers," Benioff said during Salesforce's earnings call. "We're not doing some of these kind of engineering efforts that may or may not have some kind of huge payoff, but is going to take down all of our cash and all of our margin for the next several years."

Instead, Benioff said the company is "augmenting" its existing product line with AI and taking advantage of "incredible" infrastructure investments by others to deliver on what he has called the "digital labor revolution."

Benioff's comments come as Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta have ramped up their planned AI investments for this year.

Amazon is leading the way, planning to allocate over $100 billion in capital expenditures this year, up from $77 billion in 2024. The vast majority will be spent on expanding Amazon Web Services and scaling AI infrastructure, the company said earlier this month.

Microsoft, which Benioff singled out by name on the earnings call, plans to spend $80 billion on AI-related infrastructure this year.

The Salesforce CEO isn't convinced by Microsoft's AI-powered workplace tools, describing the company as the "reseller of OpenAI" and questioning the company's agentic AI offering.

"Where on their side are they delivering agents? Where in their company have they done this? Where are they at best practice?" Benioff said, adding, "Do they have humans and agents working together to create customer success? Are they re-balancing their workforce with humans and agents?"

It's not the first time that Benioff has publicly taken shots at Microsoft.

Last year, he openly mocked Microsoft's AI assistant, Copilot, on multiple occasions, calling it "disappointing" and comparing it to Clippy, Microsoft's discontinued animated paperclip assistant.

Microsoft's chief communications officer, Frank X. Shaw, said in a LinkedIn post last month that "Marc has no idea what he's talking about" and suggested that Benioff's anti-Microsoft comments were part of a marketing strategy.

Meanwhile, Benioff is pushing Salesforce's own rival agentic AI offering.

"Our goal is to be the number one provider of digital labor in the world," he said during the earnings call. "That's it. I don't think there really is another goal."

Salesforce reported fourth-quarter revenue of $9.99 billion, missing a consensus estimate of $10.04 billion.

Its shares fell by 5% in extended trading after the company forecasted fiscal 2026 revenue below Wall Street expectations.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a Business Insider request for comment.

• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has no shortage of stories about the late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.
• Benioff interned at Apple in college and got to know Jobs as he moved on to Oracle and Salesforce.
• On a recent podcast episode, he recalled advice Jobs gave him when he had "entrepreneur's block."

Ask a major tech CEO for a Steve Jobs story, and you'll probably get one.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff certainly has his fair share of stories about the late Apple cofounder.

Benioff interned at Apple while in college, and the two got to know each other as Benioff moved on to Oracle and ultimately cofounded Salesforce.

On a recent episode of "Lenny's Podcast," Benioff recalled some advice Jobs dispensed when Benioff was going through "entrepreneur's block."

He recalled Jobs telling him that there were "three things you need to do right now."

First: "Your company, it better get 10 times larger than it is now in 24 months or it's over."

Second: "You better sign a huge customer for this Salesforce automation product, like Avon." (Benioff added, "The CEO of Avon was on his board at the time, so that was on his mind.")

And finally: "You better go build an application economy."

Benioff recalled being confused. He said he asked Jobs what he meant by that, to which Jobs responded, "I don't know, but you're going to go figure it out."

Benioff described the conversation as "like meeting with your guru and getting a Zen koan or something where now you have a puzzle I have to solve."

"I literally went away, and I had all the notes from the meeting," he said. "I went through it over and over again. And then finally I'm like, I think he wants me to build an app store."

Salesforce launched AppExchange, its apps and services store, in 2006. Apple launched its app store in 2008. Benioff later gave Apple the App Store trademark and the appstore.com domain as a gift.

Benioff said he was "very grateful to have that relationship" with Jobs, adding that it "dramatically influenced me in my career and my whole life."

• Salesforce isn't investing as much in AI as some of its competitors, and its CEO likes it that way.
• Marc Benioff said some of its rivals are in "a race to the bottom" with "excessive" AI spending.
• Benioff's plan? "I'm going to take advantage of their spending to make my products better," he said.

Salesforce's CEO says the company isn't spending as lavishly on AI as some of its tech peers — and he isn't worried about falling behind.

Instead, Marc Benioff says the company will capitalize on the vast AI spending gap between it and some of its competitors and avoid a "race to the bottom."

"I think they're going to keep spending and it's going to be expensive for them and it's going to drive their margins down," he said on a Monday episode of the "On with Kara Swisher" podcast. "I'm going to take advantage of their spending to make my products better and lower cost and easier for my customers."

Salesforce offers multiple enterprise AI products, including Agentforce, its newly announced suite of AI agents that automate workplace tasks, and its AI Cloud, which hosts LLMs from partners like Amazon Web Services. It also offers Einstein Copilot, a generative AI-powered assistant for customer relationship management.

The Salesforce CEO said "the way we've architected our platform" has allowed the company to spend less on AI and its AI models "are incredibly efficient."

"We do things a little differently, the way we train, the way we write the software," he said. "And also we tend to use other people's data centers, so we will use Amazon and Google and others and not rely on too much of our own hardware — although we have some, it's not our philosophy."

Benioff said some of Salesforce's competitors were "excessive" with their AI spending and "it's becoming a race to the bottom for some of these companies."

"While there is a big movement of a lot of companies into these kind of public clouds I think that we have to be careful exactly how much we're investing," he added.

It's not clear exactly how much Salesforce has invested in its own AI efforts. However, the company's research and development costs for the third quarter were $1.35 billion, a year-over-year increase of around 12.6%.

Benioff said the spending by Salesforce's rivals was evident in the companies' energy use, which he said should also be managed. He also highlighted that some have invested in nuclear energy and nuclear power plants.

"This is really an unusual development," he said.

Some of the biggest names in tech have announced major deals to source nuclear energy to power their data centers.

Meta a few days ago said it's putting out a request for proposals from nuclear energy developers in a bid to help power its AI ambitions and sustainability initiatives. In September, Microsoft inked a 20-year power purchase agreement with energy company Constellation in a deal that would bring part of Three Mile Island, the site of the worst nuclear energy accident in the US, back online. In October, Google announced a deal to buy nuclear energy from small modular reactors to be built by Kairos Power.

While Wall Street has been keen to hear from CEOs when the billions invested in AI will start bearing fruit, there are signs the spending isn't slowing down.

Meta said in its latest earnings report that it expects "a significant acceleration in infrastructure expense growth next year" and "significant capital expenditures growth in 2025," owing in no small part to its work on AI. Microsoft's CFO similarly said in its recent quarterly earnings that the company expected its own capital expenditure to increase owing to demand for its cloud and AI services.

Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity AI, touched on a similar sentiment as Benioff when he said in a recent talk at Stanford that building proprietary AI models is extremely costly and his startup would much rather build off of other firms' models.

"We had a conviction that, number one, models are going to get increasingly commoditized and if you do want to be one of those players that are a provider of the models, you need to have an insane amount of funding and you need to be a company that is losing billions of dollars a year and it's still fine," he said.

"We were not in a position to be and we didn't want to be either," the Perplexity CEO said. "So we decided to use other people's models and shape them to be really good for end-to-end consumer experience."

• Salesforce's stock rose 10% after hours Tuesday after beating third-quarter revenue expectations.
• On the earnings call CEO Marc Benioff stressed the importance of digital labor and AI agents.
• Benioff said humans are already working with AI agents and that robots will be next.

The future is here and it's humans working alongside robots, according to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

Salesforce reported its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday, beating revenue expectations and sending the stock price up around 10% as of market close on Wednesday.

During the earnings call, Benioff made it clear he's all in on Agentforce, the company's service that clients can use to build AI-powered agents. AI agents, which can operate computers and complete tasks that might otherwise require human hands, have been touted by some as the next big thing in generative AI.

Benioff seems to agree.

Agentforce became generally available in late October and allows companies to create their own custom AI agents. Benioff said the company delivered 200 deals in that first week and that he expects demand for AI agents to increase, calling Salesforce the "largest supplier of digital labor."

Benioff said some Salesforce clients already building out their digital labor force include FedEx, Adecco, Accenture, Ace Hardware, IBM, and RBC Wealth Managements.

Benioff said that in addition to humans working alongside AI agents, they'll soon be working alongside robots as well.

"On top of this agentic layer, we'll soon see a robotic layer as well where these agents will manifest into robots," he said, adding, "These agents are not tools. They are becoming collaborators."

Benioff has previously said he thought the "upper limits" of large language models, which power chatbots like ChatGPT, had been reached and that the future was AI agents.

Salesforce isn't the only tech company focusing on agents. Microsoft helps customers create agents through its AI studio, Copilot. Meta is working on agents, Google its making AI agents with Gemini, and Bloomberg recently reported OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, plans to launch AI agents next year.

Benioff also said on the earnings call that the rise in digital labor means "productivity is no longer tied to workforce growth, but to this intelligent technology that can be scaled without limits."

"This isn't just some far off future," he added, "It's happening right now."

• On an analyst call, Marc Benioff described an injury he sustained recently while on a trip to Fakarava.
• The Salesforce CEO brushed off the incident and highlighted early traction for Agentforce.
• Wall Street sees Agentforce's success as crucial for Salesforce's growth.

There's nothing like an AI-powered stock surge to take your mind off other problems.

Late on Tuesday, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff described a painful injury he sustained recently while visiting Fakarava, a remote atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

"Everybody knows I've been wearing a boot because I ruptured my Achilles on a scuba-diving trip to Fakarava, which is an incredible place in the Tuamotus in French Polynesia, for my birthday," he said during an earnings conference call with analysts.

Benioff brushed it off swiftly, though.

"I'm sure we all know the international motto of Fakarava, which I have close to my heart, which is 'I don't give a Fakarava,'" he joked.

The CEO has reason to be in a buoyant mood. Salesforce stock jumped 9% to a record on Wednesday.

The company's $9.44 billion third-quarter revenue was up 8% compared with the same quarter last year, beating Wall Street expectations.

More importantly, Benioff shared some early signs of positive traction for Salesforce's latest AI product, Agentforce, which helps customers design AI agents.

The CEO said Salesforce "delivered" 200 deals for this new generative-AI offering after it became generally available in the last week of the quarter.

This is a far cry from the challenges Benioff grappled with back in 2022. It was two years ago nearly to the day that Salesforce announced Bret Taylor, the co-CEO and likely successor to Benioff, would step down. Activist investors, including Starboard Value, were pushing Salesforce to improve profit margins.

"This call is the two-year anniversary of our transformation," Benioff said on Tuesday's call. "It's been a financial transformation, and it's been a technology transformation."

Benioff pointed to AI investments over the past two years, the integration of its core customer-relationship-management platform, and the increase in the number of engineers at the company.

In an October presentation, Starboard said Salesforce had significantly expanded operating margins and improved growth, but it added that the company could "continue to become more efficient and more profitable." Starboard also said Agentforce had the potential to improve revenue growth.

Benioff boasted that Agentforce had an "incredible" pipeline of future transactions, but Salesforce still needs to prove it can get customers to buy the product, which has been a challenge for many generative-AI tools so far.

Benioff touted what he called Salesforce's "unfair advantage" over other generative-AI tools because Agentforce is grounded on customer data, such as purchases and returns.

He also took the latest in a series of recent jabs at Microsoft's generative-AI assistant, Copilot, calling it a "repackaged ChatGPT," meaning a derivative of the chatbot made by Microsoft's partner and competitor OpenAI. A Microsoft executive recently responded to Benioff's jabs in an interview with Business Insider, saying, "History tells us that when competitors talk about you, it's because they're behind."

In written remarks after the Salesforce earnings call on Tuesday, the Third Bridge analyst Charlie Miner said Salesforce needed a transformative catalyst such as Agentforce to overcome the risk of "sliding into the stagnation typical of a mature, legacy software platform."

"Despite Salesforce making AI its defining narrative, the true turning point hinges on Agentforce execution and adoption," Miner wrote. "If it proves to be an AI winner and delivers as a revenue driver, Salesforce's business could see a significant leap forward as early as mid-2025."

Are you a Salesforce employee or someone else with insight to share?

Contact Ashley Stewart via email ([email protected]) or send a secure message from a non-work device via Signal (+1-425-344-8242).

• Tech titan Marc Benioff says we're near the "upper limits" of LLM use in AI advancement.
• In a podcast, the Salesforce CEO said the future of AI lies in agents that work autonomously.
• "'Terminator'? Maybe we'll be there one day," Benioff said, referencing the 1984 film about a cyborg assassin.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, in an episode of The Wall Street Journal's "Future of Everything" podcast, said he thinks the future of AI advancement lies in autonomous agents — not the large language models used to train bots like ChatGPT.

"I actually think we're hitting the upper limits of the LLMs right now," Benioff said.

Over the last several years, Benioff said, we've all "got drunk on the ChatGPT Kool-Aid," leading the average consumer to believe that AI is more powerful than it is and that LLMs are key to advancement in the technology. But there is a burgeoning use of artificial intelligence — autonomous agents, which can be deployed to conduct tasks independently, such as executing sales communications or marketing campaigns — that he says will be more significant than LLMs have been for companies trying to become more efficient and transform the world of work.

Salesforce offers prebuilt and customizable AI agents for clients seeking to automate customer service tasks. OpenAI is closing in on a launch date for its own agents, which Bloomberg reported will be able to complete assigned tasks like writing code or booking travel.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently said he believes we'll all eventually be working alongside agents and "AI employees."

"We have incredible tools to augment our productivity, to augment our employees, to prove our margins, to prove our revenues, to make our companies fundamentally better, have higher fidelity relationships with our customers," Benioff said. "But we are not at that moment that we've seen in these crazy movies — and maybe we will be one day, but that is not where we are today."

Benioff said the general public has learned about the power of AI agents from movies like the 1984 film "Terminator," starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and about a cyborg assassin, and the 2002 hit "Minority Report," about police preemptively arresting would-be criminals using AI-powered technology to detect crime before it occurs.

Benioff said there are some industry insiders and AI evangelists who suggest the tech, which hasn't yet evolved too far beyond LLMs, is capable of feats like curing cancer or solving climate change — but not only is that overstating what the technology can do, he said, it's misleading to people who could benefit from it through applications in which it is currently useful.

"This idea that these AI priests and priestesses are out there telling the world things about AI that are not true is a huge disservice to these enterprising customers who can increase their margins, increase their revenues, augment their employees, improve their customer relationships," Benioff said.

He added: "Yes, you can do all of these things with AI, but this other part — that we are all living in 'Minority Report?' No, we're not there yet. Maybe we'll be there one day. 'Terminator?' Maybe we'll be there one day. 'WarGames' — I hope we will never be there."

In the 1983 film "WarGames," starring Matthew Broderick, a high school student hacks a military supercomputer, activating the country's nuclear arsenal and risking World War III.

Representatives for Salesforce did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.